This, it was given to me to know...that many worlds have been enslaved by the Beast and his army, the Slayers. And this, too, was given me to know...that the Beast would come to our world, the world of Krull, and his Black Fortress would be seen in the land. That the smoke of burning villages would darken the sky, and the cries of the dying echo through deserted valleys. - Ynyr, the Old One
Even across the vast stretches of the galaxy, legends are spread, tales are told between sentient minds. There was one in particular that was shared by most, a warning, a curse to those suffered it, the story of the Dark One, also known as the Beast, who had existed for as long as any could remember. None could say where He had come, but there were the usual speculations among the imaginative and the scholarly.
One popular legend claimed that the Beast had once been the brightest and most beautiful of all the Creator's servants until pride, jealousy and iniquity found it and as a result fell into the lower universe where it declared itself the enemy of all things that the Creator loved. There was another school of thought that dismissed this out of hand, saying that the Beast had been a man (or something very much like a man), who either through brilliance or sorcerer's skill or mental prowess (and in almost all versions hubris) ascended to his current, nearly omnipotent state, and having as a result been changed externally to reflect the darkness of his soul.
For the inhabitants of the Crescent Cluster, it was said the Beast was the very first being to achieve sentience. Immortal, alone and all-powerful by virtue of its unique state, it had seen the birth and death of suns, and as such approached omniscience as it was wise and knowledgeable beyond all understanding.
There were still others in the Ebony Rings that believed that the Beast was a natural part of the universe; having no beginning and no end, a living, elemental embodiment of the drive to power, the will to conquer that was weaved into the fabric of all life, sentience and matter. The Beast could no more be destroyed than one could eliminate evil itself.
Whatever the truth of the Beast's origin, for billions of years no power could stand against him. Not one in a million worlds might be visited by the Beast, but where the Beast did come, he and his servants invaded and brought complete terror and destruction.
What was known and never questioned was how the Beast traveled the confines of the galaxy, and wherever there was life and civilization, the Beast acted against it. Again, the accounts varied on exactly what the Beast did with those worlds that it found like bright shiny pebbles on the shores of the endless night. Most insisted that the Beast was a destroyer, that he held nothing but hatred for any being that was not itself or that it was driven by a ghastly unnatural hunger of the life essence itself. There were tales of the Beast using its immense power to drain a planet's life, reducing once fertile, verdant worlds to deserts of hard-packed sand and rock. Some legends went beyond that, saying instead that the Beast used cosmic siege-engines to shatter the planets that it targeted, making them into rings of asteroids and other debris. And there were a few legends that went beyond even that, insisting the Beast had only to close its taloned fist, and the very sun itself would spit forth solar flares as it was aged to the end of its life-cycle and go expand outward to consume the system whose light it once nurtured.
Most said the Beast was not necessarily simply a destroyer, but also a conqueror and a slaver. Numerous reports implied that the Beast approached the nations and kingdoms of the worlds he invaded with the demand of allegiance and surrender. If a planet was united, the Beast would ask them all, and if the world complied, the Beast would appoint governors and viceroys from among the most evil and depraved of its citizenry. If the planet was divided into many states or kingdoms, the Beast would select one faction and raise them up, making them strong enough to subdue and subjugate all the others. It was also said that if even a single individual voiced opposition, the Beast would deploy legions of its Slayers; armored, faceless servitors of putrid flesh and glistening metal to make war with all. The Slayers obeyed the Beast without question and appeared to be in endless supply; legends spoke of entire nations deluged under their numbers, "all spewing forth like maggots from a burst corpse", as one witness described it. Villages were burned, and the survivors taken as slaves to erect monuments and graven-images of the Beast's maddening visage.
The more optimistic said that the Beast was neither a conqueror nor a destroyer, but rather a preserver, yea, a collector of worlds. They spoke of entire stars enclosed in crystal spheres, worlds stolen and taken through gateways to unfathomable realities. The Beast was a protector, a curator, the enemy of the wolf at the end of time known as entropy.
Whether conqueror, destroyer or preserver, all knew what happened whenever the Beast acted, another star went out, and of all those billions in a galaxy of stars, there would now be one less.
It came out of the darkness of the void between, as if it were part of that cold void, part of that dark itself. It was the oldest predator, stalking the angles between the systems with immeasurable patience and cunning.
Soundlessly, it floated. Undetected, and to further legend usually quite undetectable it appeared at the outskirts of the binary star system, propelling itself towards the smaller sun with glacial slowness, its purpose needing no haste, having no impediment. There was no source for the Fortress' movement, no rockets, no jets or streams or other source of propulsion, for the will of He Who Commands was enough. With unhurried grace, the dark mass made its way to intercept the orbit of the system's second planet; its mass attracted sheets of various interplanetary gases, forming a faintly luminescent halo of poisonous green as it gathered its strength for the plunge downwards, turning its position from the horizontal to the vertical as it did so. As it encountered the atmosphere, its surface took on a bright red glow from the friction, acquiring a tail of luminescence in the process; red upon black.
High in the sky, in an isolated valley, the eastern sun was momentarily blotted out by the immense black object. Through the lowering clouds it came, slowly descending; vast and menacing and borne aloft by some unfathomable gravimetric principle unknown to even the knowledge of any scholar. It was at an intersection of lines and panes of electromagnetic force that the black mountain attempted its landing. From the instant that it entered the atmosphere the mountain developed an immense static charge from its friction with the air. Even at thirty miles from the planet's surface, it released energy in the form of an immense lightning bolt. Again and again, it discharged, lighting verdant forests aflame, boiling small lakes and pools, quicker and quicker as the interval between the bolts. To an observer, it would look as if the black fortress were disgorging a solid sheet of energy to obliterate everything beneath it.
At twenty miles, the clouds parted and the virgin world of Krull could be seen, like a lover ready to receive its suitor. Majestic mountains rose up as though waiting for the newcomer to join their ranks. When the impact finally occurred, it seemed to cause the entire planet of Krull to tremble; the iron center of its core reverberating with the impact, and the resulting pulse of energy sent down to it. Gaping cracks and fissures suddenly appeared in the landscape, each miles in width that splayed from where its base had landed like lightning forks. Billowing clouds of planetary matter poured from the wounds in the surface.
Mountain villagers in the town of Banbreak starting their day soon found themselves beset by sudden avalanches, and hundreds were crushed under the falling rock and landslides, the very first casualties of the Beast's war upon Krull. The tremors were felt at far as the edge of the sea.
The Fortress had impacted, and through the dust of its debris clouds glimpses of it could be seen. It resembled nothing so much as a basalt and granite mountain, perhaps two miles high and six in circumference. Upon closer inspection individual details became apparent, making the Fortress resemble more of an ancient cathedral with massive, hexagonal rock cones forming spires, outcroppings of granite making battlements, crystals of opaque quartz growing into turrets and colonnades, all surrounding and complimenting its colossal central dome made of dull granite. Interlaced into the mineral was also an unmistakable organic element. Crystalline bulbs were embedded in its surface like boils or tumors or eggs. Outlining some of the rock outcroppings were calcified matter or the chitin of some immense insect. Even the granite dome appeared to be some massive anomalous ovarian cyst, faint veins seemed to be embossed on the dome's surface, and covering parts of it irregular spikes of stone and lesser spherical cysts sprang from deep fissures on its surface.
If one were to inspect the Fortress even closer, their examination would reveal that individual surfaces of the Fortress seemed subtly wrong. Lines and curves intersected, locked together, the angles often tilted from the vertical, almost as if the entire structure had been subjected to partial destruction and healed again. Angles that had first seemed to complement one another seemed monstrously dissonant, hostile. There were places on its surface that almost resembled jagged, ramps, bands cut into the sides of the mountain like the leather strip wrapped around the handle of a whip, but should any have attempted to climb those ramps, they would soon find themselves at the bottom. Parts of the mountain sagged in some places only to bulge oddly in others.
Within the depths of that dome lay a smaller dome, this one bone-white, hexagonal; like some immense insect nest. In the darkness of that lesser dome, eyes that had been closed for centuries of interstellar traveled opened wide, swollen and ripe with blood, bulging from their misshapened sockets.
It was still daytime when the Black Fortress landed. On Krull's night side however, those who were sleeping were the first to experience them: dreams, horrific nightmares that caused the sleeper to toss and turn, finally awakening with a tormented scream. Upon waking, they could not recall what the nightmare consisted of, merely that they couldn't return to slumber, or didn't dare, lest they see the nightmare more clearly.
Other things occurred, scattered here and there in each and every one of the Fifty Kingdoms of Krull. Farm animals would bleat and howl, foam at the mouth; some of those that were pregnant would miscarry and the resulting offspring were misshapen things that sometimes crawled away on their own. On the distant shore surrounding a fishing village, countless fish and other marine life washed up on the beaches having experienced a flight of mindless panic. Flocks of birds from all over found themselves falling from the skies as they attempted their seasonal migration, and children playing in the fields would see them fall like snow, feet crunching against their fragile bodies.
In an isolated monastery, an ancient order known as the Emerald Seers instantly went mad as their potent senses were overwhelmed by the immensity of the evil that had manifested on their world. One by one, they succumbed to death, grasping their heads as they were plunged into nightmare visions that froze their hearts in their chests; their scrolls and tablets useless now, their unique mental abilities only making them hyper-sensitive to the Beast's influence and causing their deaths. Only one survived through the quick actions of his apprentice, and even he was henceforth rendered blinded forever.
In her house of silk, the Widow of the Web's attention was briefly drawn away from her grief, but only for a moment. The spider, however, expressed anxiety; skittering this way and that across the milky white strands, its chelicerae beating rapidly in agitation.
Within a cave in the Granite Mountains, an old man named Ynyr the Ancient wept for hours before packing his bags to leave on a journey.
At a small wooden farmhouse at the edge of the civilized world, a youth by the name of Ergo fled into the night, finally escaping the inebriated wrath of his father and the whipping stick that he always carried.
And finally within a marble and drapery-lined palace bedroom, Princess Lyssa, the daughter of King Eirig slept peacefully, her breathing regular, her heartbeat strong and smooth, her dreams undisturbed.